Swarm (4 page)

“Does Marvin know?”

I shook my head hard. That wasn't what I wanted. “He'll take her,” I said. I hoped to keep going: plan how we would catch you, talk about bringing you home, but Thomson interrupted me.

“Where?”

I couldn't answer that. “He doesn't want her here,” I said, but my words were cut off as he sputtered, the ever-present cough ending our discussion. I wrapped my arm around his shoulders, relieved because I'd heard judgment in his voice, like he didn't really believe me. “It's not far now,” I said and led him along the last stretch of the trail.

Thomson
had taken to sleeping downstairs, saying his room was too cold at night. I brought him to the couch and slid his shoes off and tucked him in with a beige wool blanket that the supply ship had delivered last autumn.

“How is he?” Marvin asked when I entered the kitchen.

“Up and down. Now he just needs to sleep.”

A pile of cedar roots sat on the counter. Their thin red skin chipped by the shovel. I picked them up and draped them over a nail pounded into the wall.

“Did you finish the fence?” I asked, playing with the dangling roots as if they were hair.

Marvin nodded.

“I'm glad nobody barricaded us out.”

“Come on. That's different.”

How?
I wondered.

Marvin moved over to the sink as I pulled two beets from their bin of dirt in the cupboard. I turned away from him, thinking of the things I would have to teach you. Wild harvesting. How we use cedar for so many things. String for shoes and tying together stalks of herbs for drying. We make a tea from its foliage for vitamin C. Without that your teeth will fall out and your skin will turn black. Thomson taught me about Jacques Cartier, the early explorer. How he'd watched his crew drop dead from scurvy before the Aboriginal people showed him how to make cedar tea. That was in the 1500s. Back when people lived a lot like we live now except that they didn't know any differently. Sumac is also good. Soak the red berries and drink the liquid. It's tangy, like a juice.

“If you went to the lake you should have brought back water,” Marvin said, interrupting my thoughts. He washed his hands in a basin of grey water in the sink. I cut up the beets as he slid a bar of soap between his hands and placed it, coated in brown grime, by the hot water tap that doesn't work. The silence between us was tense, and it reminded me of our last night in the dark zone, lying together in the cold attic room, after he'd told me most of the truth, trying to think of a way out. He'd wanted to run, I remembered. The easy way out.

I kept my back to him, relieved when he laid the towel on a stool under the useless wall telephone and left the room.

By
the time I served supper, Thomson was deeply asleep. Mouth open, he lay awkwardly, his shoulders twisted toward the back of the couch. Normally I would have let him sleep, but that night I shook him awake while Marvin watched. I wanted him to eat something, to fill his stomach with nutrients.

“Lascaux,” he said, his eyes fluttering open, the whites tinted yellow. “Lucy.”

“Where's he gone to?” Marvin asked.

“I don't know.” His delirium scared me. Bringing him to the lake, out into the evening wind, seemed like a mistake. I should have let him rest or bathed him and sat him by the fire. He was overdue and starting to smell. Night was settling. Marvin went out onto the porch as I helped Thomson swallow a few sips of thyme and mullein tea and then let him slide back into sleep.

Dusk filled the house while Marvin and I ate supper.

“We need to check the bees tomorrow,” I said and told Marvin how Thomson had wanted to go there. Marvin shovelled a forkful of greens into his mouth.

“The mites are just going to get them,” he said as he chewed.

“That's optimistic,” I mumbled.

“It's true.”

“Do it for Thomson.” I pushed my beets around on the plate, watched their juice stain the fish pink. I was sick of them. On the other side of the large room, Thomson choked in his sleep. Marvin pushed his chair back and went to the couch, holding him upright as Thomson spat into the torn square of a sheet. I shaded my eyes with my hand and stared down at my plate. Before Marvin was through with Thomson, I took my food to the kitchen. From the cupboard, I pulled a package of red paper plates and filled one with my leftover beet slices and a large chunk of whitefish. I took it out the back door and put it on the porch for you. As if you were one of the stray cats that wandered the island before they were all hunted out. Skin and bones, on your way to going wild. When I stood and turned around, Marvin was standing in the doorway.

“What are you doing?”

“If she's going to steal,” I started to say.

“She?”

And I told him. Thomson would have, sooner or later, even if it just slipped out.

Through my life, I've imagined certain moments. My wedding, the way I would tell my husband that I was going to have his baby, how I would deal with my mother's death. But that evening, I stood on the porch, the crickets in the background, a distant owl screeching its strange whinnying cry, and what I told Marvin was that I'd seen your footprints in our garden. Evidence of a new beginning. A child that could be ours.

“They're tiny,” I said. “She's a little—”

“That's a third of our food,” he said, gesturing at the plate. A bright red polka dot on the weathered boards. It was August, no longer the beginning of summer, and we'd been salting fish for three months. There were beans and carrots and jams to can. Wild apples to dry. I looked down at your fish and beets. I'd covered your food with torn shards of plastic wrap from the ancient roll I'd found with the plates in the cupboard of a church.

“Without the ship . . .” Marvin said.

“The ship will come.”

“Sandy. We can't do this. We won't survive this way.”

“If she was our child . . .”

Marvin paused. “Maybe we'd eat her,” he said, his voice harder than I'd ever heard it before, and he went back into the house.

I stared at the slammed door. When I heard the bush rustle behind me, I turned toward the sound, but the night was dark. The moon a waxing crescent. I wanted to call out to you—
Melissa
—shout your name like my mother did during summer twilight, the sun setting fire to the corn stalks. But I kept silent. All I could do was hope you'd come before the animals.

Marvin's eyes scanned
the dark cross-hatch of intersections, assessed figures that slipped out of doorways. Most kept moving but when a few remained, standing in a lopsided triangle on a low stone step, he turned abruptly to cross the street, corralling me with his body. Around us, the buildings grew taller. In the wealth­iest area, near where I used to work, the sidewalk was littered with dead birds that had flown into the skyscrapers so we moved into the gutter to avoid the crunch of their little bones. I pointed out the Parthenon offices and watched as Marvin's gaze climbed the glass exterior and fell back to the front doorway, its glass smashed in. A closed-circuit camera lay in the entranceway, red and green wires pulled out like entrails, and I thought of the mice our barn cats sometimes left at the back door. “Impressive,” Marvin said as we continued past a row of cut-open streetlights, all the copper stripped, into a poorer part of the city where prostitutes lingered, their eyes dismissing us, and as I began to sober up, I started second-guessing myself, thinking that this was likely a mistake, taking an unknown journey with a strange man I'd just met.

In our lives now, on this island, there is little room for self-doubt, probably because our well-being doesn't depend so much on our own decisions, the directions we choose, but on other forces like the weather, the people around us, our capacity to work. That night, though, I'd made a choice and realized too late I might regret it.

“How did you meet Margo?” I asked, trying to lighten the heavy silence.

“She told me about you,” he said, his voice a low whisper like we were moving through a giant's house, trying to avoid waking it up. “But you aren't what I expected.”

“What were you expecting?”

He shrugged, but I thought I knew: someone tougher, more like Margo. What he said, though, surprised me. “She didn't say you'd be so pretty.” I glanced into the street and blushed.

“You can't take a compliment?”

“Sure,” I said, and we were silent. We walked a ways before Marvin turned suddenly into an alley. I hesitated at the open mouth. “Come on,” he coaxed. Beside me, the steel door of a strip club swung open and a man tumbled out, his watery red eyes fastening to mine. Our gaze held for a split second before I moved, following Marvin down the greasy tunnel that smelled putrid and dusky, like urine and rotten garbage.

The alley was a shortcut that Marvin took to forage for bottles and anything else that might make him money—or so he said. He dug a couple of green glass bottles out of an aluminum garbage can and turned his back to me so I could slip them in his pack. After that, we headed south, and as we walked, he scuffed the soles of his shoes against the sidewalk, sending chunks of ice and grit into the gutter. We passed a sugar factory with silent smokestacks, windows clear of glass. In the distance I saw the closed highway overpass, chunks of rubble around its footings. I slipped a hand into my coat pocket, wishing for a cellphone. Stores with iron gates over their windows lined the street.

“Your friends are down here?” I asked. Up ahead, I saw a crowd of people gathered.

“You could call them that.”

“What do they do?”

“They apply bandages.”

“Like first aid?”

He laughed. He pointed ahead. “Ten minutes.” Soon we would run into the lake and I wondered what was between here and there, apart from the clutch of people who stood in a knot on the sidewalk.

“What happened to Walter?” I asked.

I expected Marvin to tell me that Walter had escaped being redeployed to the Middle East or something, because Margo had said that those were the people who lived at the Tavern. But it turned out that he was from a city close to where my parents lived and that he'd blown his hand off making crystal meth. Marvin told me this in a deadpan voice, matter-of-fact. I wondered why they were friends.

“They're together? He and Margo?”

“You don't know?”

“She doesn't tell me everything.”

I tried another question: “Did you meet Margo through Walter?”

“My turn,” he said. “What'll you do if you don't find a job?” I shrugged, and he said, “Go home to Mommy and Daddy?”

“It isn't like that,” I said, annoyed. “There's not much of a home to go to.”

“No?”

I told him what had happened, how my father had found oil on our land. He stopped walking, his lips rounding around the word: “Oil?”

I was glad to have his full attention so I told him the rest, how I grew up in a cornfield, the horizon yellow and blue, a wide, white field in winter. I spent a lot of time staring out at that expanse, thinking about my future, and I guess my mother did too because she developed a lot of ideas about what I would do with my life. Most of them coincided with the summer a tornado came through and dug a deep trench that grew a slimy black snake of oil. Four men came, their glossy shoes making small explosions of dust as my father led them into the corn. An hour later, my father came inside. “They'll let us know,” he said, and I saw a light in his eyes, and that's when the planning began.

“For what?” Marvin asked.

“University, renovations, even a brand-new house.” Every Sunday they sat at the picnic table behind the house. Chunks of broken bricks from our half-collapsed chimney holding down unpaid bills and hand-scrawled budgets. The corn stalks bent like foreign letters spelling out a secret way. Over and over again, they asked me,
What do you want to be? Where do you see yourself in ten years?
As if I could possibly know.

I told Marvin the rest: how we'd lost the property, how the bank came in and took it all away, how my father fought them and how it was the beginning of the end for him.

Up the street, the gathered men seemed to be watching, waiting for us to move. The smoke from their cigarettes lifted like a mist off cold water.

“Do you have a job?” I asked, trying to move the conversation along.

Marvin shook his head.

“How do you get money?” I thought about having to eat, not knowing at all where next week's food would come from or even how I would pay my share of the rent. I waited for him to tell me how he could live without that, what his secret was, but he reached out and grabbed my upper arm. I thought he was going to kiss me.

Instead, he waved his free hand, taking in the collapse around us, and said, “None of this is going to last.” I thought he was talking about us, whatever we were, and I started to say something rehearsed, a phrase I was used to speaking like,
I'm not looking for a relationship
, even though that wasn't true, but Marvin interrupted me. And that was when he gave it to me. Right then, standing across the road from a broken white rectangle of a pawn shop sign, beside the faded posters of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and palm-treed beaches posted in the window of a travel agency.

Face flushed, fingertips pressing purple dots into my arm, he said, “It's all coming down. It has to.” I winced and tugged at my arm. His fingers opened and I stepped back. His hand hung in the air as if he was a businessman, asking me to shake it, waiting to seal the deal.

“There's no going back.”

I thought he meant me. I glanced at the street we'd walked down, the pocket of men waiting up ahead.

“Us,” he said. I waited, and his voice hammered each syllable as if he was talking to an idiot: “Our society. We're like the Roman Empire. A glorified era that ended in the Dark Ages. From there they could have gone anywhere. And what happened?”